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Email Marketing Checklist

Here’s the rules that I follow when producing an HTML Email. Some of these rules may seem obvious, some may seem stupid and some may go against everything you may have learned about web standards, best practices, semantic html and accessibility. This last one is a hard thing to accept. And trust me, I’m all about those things when it comes to building web sites and web pages but the #1 rule of all is that EMAILS ARE NOT WEB PAGES! They just look like them and are built the same way. But whereas a web page may be viewed on 3 to 6 primary browsers, emails are viewed many, many more.

First you have the email clients, Outlook 2007/2003, Entourage 2008/2004, Lotus Notes 6.5/7/8, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Apple Mail and Thunderbird. In my experience, these are the most common currently. There’s also many other POP3/IMAP clients but I don’t encounter them too often. (Yes, I know you use them, but if you’re reading this you’re not the target audience I work with usually). Second you have the wonderful web-based clients such as MSN, Yahoo, Gmail and the wonderful OWA. Multiply these clients by your expected browser/platform combinations, too, because OWA IE is completely different than OWA Firefox. Third, don’t forget about people that don’t have images turned on. These people need a reason to download your creative and if your email can’t be understood without images it might just get skipped. And last there’s the text-based email which isn’t used too much anymore but should still be considered.

Anyway, here’s my list. Its by no means complete and will always be growing so check back often for updates.